Futebol
Soccer, The Brazilian Way
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A new and updated edition of bestselling author Alex Bellos's classic book on soccer, unforgettably capturing the game at the heart of the Brazilian national identity.
Since the 1950s, when Pelé first started playing, soccer has been how the world sees Brazil, but it is also how Brazilians see themselves. The essence of their game is one in which prodigious individual skills outshine team tactics, where dribbles and delicate flicks are preferred over physical challenges or long-distance passes, where technique has all the elements of dance and, indeed, is often described as such. At their best, Brazilian soccer players are both athletes and artists.
As Alex Bellos brilliantly reveals in his classic book, their game can symbolize racial harmony, flamboyance, youth, innovation, and skill-in short, it's a microcosm of the country itself.
Bellos, a veteran journalist and author whose star has continued to rise since Futebol was first published in 2002, revisits his search for what the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo has called the "true truth" of the Brazilian way of life. With an unerring eye for an illustrative story and a pitch-perfect ear for the voices of the people he meets, Bellos uncovers the nuanced role soccer has played in the history of Brazil and the lives of its people.
Updated and with a new chapter covering recent events in Brazil.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After just a couple of pages into this account of the world's most popular sport, it becomes apparent that there is no American sporting equivalent to Brazil's obsession with soccer, and perhaps no equivalent worldwide either. Bellos, a Rio-based correspondent for the U.K.'s Guardian and Observer newspapers, covers virtually every acre of Brazil, from traffic-choked S o Paulo to the barren backlands, to study the country's effect on soccer and, more importantly, soccer's effect on the country. He treks beyond its borders, too, arriving amid the frigid isolation of the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to chart the progress of Brazilian footballers living there. The book comprises 15 chapters, each a compelling stand-alone focusing on an individual or group and their unique relationship with the sport. Alternately funny and dark, the book covers Brazil's introduction to soccer in the late 19th century, when the locals altered it from an orderly British game to "a dance of irrational surprises," according to one sociologist. One journalist in 1896 wrote, "It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with great sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts." Bellos offers a cast of characters as colorful as a Carnival parade: Joe Radio, the certified "most irritating fan in Brazil"; the terrifyingly violent Hawks supporters club; the beautiful contestants of the Kickabout Queen pageant; and, most fascinatingly, Garrincha a tragic, crooked-legged national team player with talent to rival Pel . Unlike Pel , however, Garrincha possessed zero ambition or wit, and died an ignominious and premature death.
